Chances are you don’t think of your association as an online business. But maybe it’s time you should. Unless yours is a local association, the only face-to-face contact you have with members not involved in governance probably occurs at the annual meeting or at conferences sprinkled around the rest of the year. In reality, most member connections occur by phone, email or your group’s website. This is especially true of large and international associations. For most associations, the primary function of a website is to house informational resources such as bylaws, board rosters and calendars. If your group’s website is meeting these needs—connecting members and serving as the go-to for industry or association information—it’s doing its job. But there are several ways your site can be better than basic—that’s where conversion rate optimization comes in.
Optimizing Your Site. One of the most modern approaches to improving user interaction on a website is conversion rate optimization, which relates to getting website visitors to take action on something you’ve proposed and posted. By maximizing this, you’re more likely to secure more volunteers for committee assignments, for example, or get members to respond to a call for award nominations.
Most associations invest money to optimize their websites for two principal reasons: a fear of falling behind competitors and/or a fear that stakeholders—especially board members, past presidents or marquee members—will fault the organization’s staff for a poorly designed or dysfunctional website. Unfortunately, both of these motivations are defensive, not offensive, strategies when it comes to website upkeep. Properly designed websites can deliver enormous revenue and have considerable engagement potential and, as such, someone should be optimizing the site’s revenue and engagement options frequently. That someone might be your own marketing staff or it could be an independent third party.
“‘Set it and forget it’ sums up how most businesses, including nonprofits, think about their websites,” said Lou McErlean, business development director for the Dallas-based Reap Marketing, which focuses on digital strategy and website optimization. “That’s so wrong. Associations need to be thinking about their websites as farmers think about their crops. Farmers don’t just plow a field, plant some seeds and come back in a couple of months to harvest the crop; they fertilize, irrigate, weed and apply pest control to their fields continually to ensure a bountiful harvest. The same is true of websites. Start thinking like a farmer. Don’t think, ‘Set it and forget it’; instead, think, ‘Test it and best it.’”
Explaining CRO. “Conversion rate” is nothing more than a simple calculation: Take the number of leads, actions or sales achieved, divide it by the number of visitors to a landing page and multiply by 100—that’s your conversion rate. Conversion takes place when a visitor responds to your call to action, a marketing term with which most of us are familiar. So conversion occurs when the call to action directs members to register online for the annual meeting, and some actually do, or when a call for volunteers for committees is issued, and members reply with an indication of their interest.
Reap Marketing is one of a handful of technology companies specializing in conversion rate optimization. Part of the process involves testing everything. This is invaluable because constant website testing is something most association staffs don’t have the time or expertise to do.
CRO is the process that requires you to improve your website to attract more visitors and prompt them to take action. But Reap Marketing has taken CRO one important step further—its objective is to focus on continuous conversion rate optimization for clients’ websites. And it’s easy to argue that continuous conversion rate optimization is pretty remarkable when looking at the results Reap Marketing has achieved.
For example, the National Business Research Institute experienced a 300 percent jump in primary call-to-action button clicks; Mactech On-site Machining Solutions enjoyed a 44 percent boost in conversions on sales averaging $20,000; and Maggiano’s Little Italy restaurants saw a 124 percent increase in email database enrollment over four years.
Boosting Online Sales. Several years ago, Reap Marketing was hired by Standish Salon Goods, whose salon equipment is sold on its website and through local distributors. Reap was brought in to boost Standish’s stagnating online sales. Reap Marketing’s continuous testing of Standish Salon’s website revealed that, among other issues, the photographs of the salon equipment did not align with the demographics of Standish’s typical customers: The photos came across as too upscale when they needed to appeal to a mid-market, value-conscious clientele.
After two site redesigns informed by hundreds of test results, Standish boasted a 950 percent increase in checkout conversions, a 1,600 percent increase in monthly revenue, a 53 percent decrease in bounce rate and a 348 percent increase in organic search traffic.
Think about the graphics of your association’s website. Are they appropriately aligned to appeal to your members? According to Brice McBeth, CEO of Reap, many aren’t. “The average e-commerce website converts at a rate of just 2 percent,” he said. “We leverage the other 98 percent. We help businesses make more money from the web traffic they already have instead of just relying on getting more traffic through more paid media.” In the case of associations, whose principal customer base is paying members, this strategy is important and logical because it is easier to boost the rate of your online conversions than it would be to bring more traffic to your website in the form of new members.
Testing to Improve Conversion Rates. So just what do CRO organizations test? In a word: everything.
Almost everything about association websites—especially how members interact with them—must be meticulously tested and tested again. To make things more complex, what is tested and proven today may change radically in several months because people’s online preferences and behaviors are fickle and constantly evolving. And more than ever, people expect to be able to find hundreds of goods and services online.
Everything about a website should be tested if you hope to maximize results. The shape, size, position and color of a call-to-action button, for example, are of huge concern. McErlean showed me how different combinations of each attribute can garner different conversion rates. The best combinations appear in high contrast to everything else on a landing page.
According to Reap Marketing’s research, providing customers with too many choices is another big obstacle to conversions. Reap Marketing recommends that associations keep choices limited and make every online transaction as simple as possible. Additionally, landing pages can be too busy or too spare, and testing ultimately reveals the best balance. The loading speed of each page has also been found to deter conversions and increase bounce rates (the rate of visitors who navigate away from the site after viewing only one page).
An all-too-common mistake is asking members for more information than is required to complete the immediate transaction. Many associations will ask members to populate a form in order to obtain a free, members-only download like a white paper, but there is no need to ask for more than the member’s login username and password (or whatever other information your site would require to confirm membership). Your marketing department loves getting the extra information that is culled from a longer form as it’s an opportunity to secure more demographic data, but if you ask for too much, it is more likely to trigger a bounce.
CRO companies conduct A/B testing regularly, which optimizes various landing pages. Usually two different landing pages will be deployed simultaneously for about two weeks. The layout, design, color and fonts of each will differ, but both will promote the action you desire the visitor to take. The objective is to determine which of the two, A or B, secures the higher conversion rate. The test is usually repeated several more times using new A’s and/or B’s based on the most recent test results.
Creating Rewards. Most of us would guess that using “free” is always guaranteed to produce the most favorable response—but we would be wrong. It’s not a given. Reap Marketing successfully created an online promotional campaign that relied on the customer spending more money but saving more as the spending increases. The lesson was that people will buy online at surprising spend rates if they feel rewarded financially for doing so. It’s a powerful, purchase-driven approach.
Associations can incorporate these lessons into their website construction. But perhaps the biggest lesson is that much is still unknown about web-user dynamics, which is why the concept of testing, testing and testing again is invaluable. When members can click on their association’s website, enjoy the experience, feel motivated by a call to action and interact with members in ways that are exciting, the value feels like more than that—it feels like a reward.